The Haircut

My brain is like a lawnmower which has been in the garage all winter, and it doesn’t start too easily. Oh, there are times when I am up all night with anxiety, but that is chatter, and chatter, is, by and large, the result of too much self-consciousness. Let me tell you – for fifty-four years I wasn’t a very self-conscious person – until the haircut.

Nobody ever told me – no friend, no wife – that the hair on one side of my head stood straight out. Not even a barber or hairstylist ever made mention of it, until one novice went to get her manager for help, and the manager pointed it out to me. I thought she was talking about one little spot, but I found out after one or two more haircuts that it was the entire side of my head. It dawned on me, as I tilted a mirror to really examine the case, that from one side I looked really stupid.

This was a blow. The one thing I always had going for me was the assumption that everybody thought I was smart. Not that brains ever got me anywhere. In fact, I’d always kind of envied several people I knew who did look stupid, and despite this handicap, they were well-loved and socially quite graceful. Smart, too. Hmmm.

The haircut is important, because I consider these posts a similar haircut for the human race. You see, even though Epicurius, Epictetus, and Plato, Lao Tse, Chuang Tse, and the Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Nietszche, and, oh, say, H. L. Mencken, have all pointed out how stupid people are, we have managed to keep a blind eye to what they were showing us. I have often wondered at God’s humorlessness, but I realized in this late epiphany, that, next to the rest of his sacred creation, people are the joke. He does have a sense of humor.

The human race is God’s red-headed stepchild, who can’t get anything right, who gets scolded again and again, and develops a bad attitude. Well, I have been a psychiatric nurse seeing red-headed stepchildren at their worst for a long time, and I can tell you that every one of them would be doing it right if they only could. But they are so lost, they have made so many wrong turns, been given bad directions, that they just keep on getting it wrong.

It’s not just them. It’s all of us. We humans just keep getting it wrong. Look in the mirror, at your haircut!

While the rest of the planet keeps evolving, ever slightly in or out of balance with ecosystems, Homo sapiens keeps progressing further and further out of harmony, lost in the stupid, human landscape.

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